lilliput start: Check This Out: TENT: Encounters with Jewish Culture

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Check This Out: TENT: Encounters with Jewish Culture | TC Jewfolk

tent logo2 Check This Out: TENT: Encounters with Jewish Culture Looking for an excuse to head out to the coasts this summer? Introducing Tent: Encounters with Jewish Culture (a program of the Yiddish Book Center), immersive, intense, FREE, week-long workshops focusing on comedy, creative writing and theater.

Tent eventually hopes to offer Jewish?twenty-somethings?weeklong workshops that will focus on all aspects of Jewish culture; not only comedy, creative writing, and theater, but food, journalism, law, film, and more as well. ?The idea is to focus on a way of being Jewish that?s not necessarily about religion, and not political, but builds on language, food, music, literature, and day-to-day life,? says Josh Lambert, Tent?s program director. ?Modern culture can inspire us to think imaginatively about what Jewishness means. And visa versa.?

In each program, a group of twenty Jews in their twenties will gather to experience that cultural field, and explore its complex Jewish connections. At Tent: Comedy in LA (March 17-24), you can discuss Jewish humor from Freud to Larry David, go out to the comedy clubs, talk shop with Jill Solloway, and meet with stand-ups and screenwriters. At Tent: Creative Writing in Amherst, MA (June 2-9) you can participate in creative writing workshops with teachers from the best MFA programs in the country, meet with agents and editors (for example, Matt Weiland from W.W. Norton, who?ll be editing Blake Bailey?s biography of Philip Roth), and discuss the long and complex relationship between Jews and the institutions of modern literature. And at Tent: Theater in NYC (August 4-11), you?ll go to Off-Broadway and Fringe Festival shows, have an intimate conversation with Tony Kushner, and read some of the classic works of American theater.

Josh lambert tent Check This Out: TENT: Encounters with Jewish Culture

Josh Lambert, Tent Executive Director

?Tent draws inspiration from the time when hundreds of thousands of Jews in America would read a daily Jewish newspaper, and when there were caf?s across the country where Jewish writers and readers would gather, every day, to argue about art and everything else. Tent: Encounters with Jewish Culture, is about creating those kinds of opportunities again. Tent aims to offer young North American Jews a new way of seeing their Jewishness: as something deep, rich, alive, and inseparable from the cultural forms and practices to which they are already committed.?

TC Jewfolk is proud to support Tent, and bring it to the attention of folks in the Midwest. Getting young Jews to engage with their Judaism in unique ways, unexpected ways, is what we?re all about. We want the Twin Cities? Jewfolk to find the Judaism in whatever it is they do for fun, then come share with us how your hobbies speak to your Jewish identity. If you are into comedy, creative writing, or theater, and can afford the transportation costs to one of these cities, you should apply to one of these workshops!

Why just the cost of transportation? Because the rest is totally FREE! Lodging, most meals, event tickets?all free. Only twenty participants will be selected for each session, though, so make your application stand out.